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After years of teaching writing and literature my teaching philosophy might be summed up by the phrase, ‘We’re all in this together.’ Several years ago I was assigned to teach Faulkner’s novel, Go Down, Moses to a group of extremely driven Advanced Placement students at New Trier High School. While I appreciate Faulkner and feel capable of teaching most novels with the possible exception of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which I still haven’t read, Go Down, Moses had me stymied from nearly the first paragraph. There was a deadly combination of missing punctuation, unknown vocabulary, obscure allusions and elliptical action. In short, I was stumped and very wary of exposing this confusion to my class who had expressed healthy skepticism about a long-term sub who had shown up eager to help them forget their “real” teacher. I took that book apart. I read, reread, consulted numerous experts, found criticism and then admitted to the class that I was…

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The only online class I ever took was to fill in a gap in my transcript. In college I eschewed science and math as if they were fatal diseases while welcoming literature, history, and philosophy. One exception, a graduate class I crashed as a freshman at Rutgers taught by the British economist E. P. Thompson who wrote The Making of the English Working Class described on Amazon as: “A seminal text on the history of the working class by one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century.” I loved the class especially the social history part taught by Dorothy Thompson, E. P. ‘s brilliant wife. The social history was based around stories, stories about labor strikes, union battles, descriptions of families and communities, public health, and education. E. P. took over in the spring and began to unpack statistics, graphs of social mobility, and the industrial revolution’s transformation of the British economy. In other words, math.

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She answered the door in sweats, the hoodie sporting the name of a well-known selective Chicago high school. Before I could speak, she said: “I’m a swimmer. I swim all the time. I don’t want to write about swimming but that’s who I am.” As a writing coach who has a large clientele of clients writing personal statements I am used to this sort of despair and blinkered thinking. Yes, swimming was fine, her rank as a swimmer would be a good thing to include on her application but it was not exactly a great story starter. Good stories need conflict and swimming is a one-person, silent sport, the conflict barely exists and when it does it’s usually something like man versus nature (girl versus nature) with a need for strong currents, crashing waves, possibly a shark, not a high school student stroking in a chlorinated pool, little at stake besides a personal best.

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